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Dashboard walkthrough — from cold start to first paper fill

End-to-end tour of QE Dashboard.app: setup → research → backtest → live paper trading. Read this once; come back to the per-feature docs for depth.

Cross-references:

0. One-time setup

Install and launch

Follow Install & first-time setup. The first-launch wizard creates a workspace and starter files; F3 WKSP opens that folder. For source builds, use the build instructions in the repository README.

Pick a broker

Start with a paper broker. Configure it in Cmd+,; complete the paper verification before selecting a live account.

Broker Cred source Notes
alpaca-paper OS keyring, with environment fallback US equities; dashboard connection.
ibkr-paper TWS or IB Gateway logged into a paper account Multi-asset, multi-currency. Need Gateway running first — see ibkr-connectivity.md.
ibkr-live TWS/Gateway logged into a live account Requires IBKR_LIVE_TRADING=I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING env var and a typed-confirmation modal. Don't pick this until you've done the paper checklist end-to-end.

1. Cmd+, — Settings pass

Open the Settings modal, walk top-to-bottom:

Section Field What to set
General Refresh interval 5s default is fine
General Vim mode On if you want vim motions in F3
Data feeds Yahoo news On — drives F1 NEWS
Data feeds L2 streaming On — drives F2 DEPTH (needs Alpaca creds)
Trading Broker alpaca-paper or ibkr-paper
Trading IBKR host / port 127.0.0.1 / 4002 for Gateway paper
Trading IBKR client id 1 (any unused int)
Research Factor window / K Defaults are fine

Close Settings → top bar shows the broker badge (PAPER · alpaca-paper, PAPER · ibkr-paper, or LIVE in red). Edits auto-save on close and on app exit.

The watchlist is not edited from Settings — edit it in-place on F1 MAIN (Cmd+P style fuzzy add, ↑/↓ to focus).

2. The screens, in workflow order

Tab / Shift+Tab cycles all eight screens in display order (F1 MAIN · F2 DEPTH · F3 WKSP · F4 BCKT · F5 RISK · F6 TRADE · F7 FCTR · F8 MAP). On F3 WKSP plain Tab cycles editor tabs instead, and Shift+Tab remains the escape hatch. F-keys jump directly. Cmd+Q quits. (This used to say "cycles F1–F6" and "F12 quits"; F12 has never been bound.)

Panel focus within a screen is Ctrl+1..N and Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+] — see Column vocabulary for what the columns mean once you get there.

F1 MAIN — see the market

Watchlist + ImPlot candles + positions/tape + Yahoo news.

  • ↑ / ↓ (or j / k in vim mode) — focus prev/next symbol
  • Click a watchlist row — focus that symbol (chart panel follows)
  • + ADD — async fuzzy search by ticker or company name
  • POSITIONS rows are LIVE from positions_json; TAPE shows the most recent fills your broker reported
  • NEWS panel — Yahoo headlines for every watched symbol on a 60 s refresh. The [all] / [focus] chip under the panel header (EPIC-71) toggles between every cached headline and only headlines whose related_tickers includes the focused symbol (the one highlighted in the watchlist). The cache keeps sweeping the full watchlist regardless — swapping focus refreshes the filtered view instantly and the focused symbol's coverage stays as fresh as everything else. State persists in the dashboard config (news_filter_focused).

F2 DEPTH — drill into microstructure

L2 book + Time & Sales + spread/imbalance/vol-burst widgets + ORDER TICKET.

  • Use this to time an entry — look at where the liquidity is, what's clearing, what the imbalance is doing.
  • ORDER TICKET is where new orders get submitted (qty, side, type, limit price → Submit). Read-only when broker = Disabled.
  • ~~WORKING ORDERS at the bottom of this screen mirrors F6's~~ Removed in EPIC-47 — F2 has no blotter. Working orders live on F6 TRADE only. (Original text kept struck through rather than deleted so anyone who remembers the panel learns where it went.) The struck line said: WORKING ORDERS at the bottom of this screen mirrors F6's blotter — convenient while you're staring at the book.

F3 WKSP — write / edit strategies

File tree (left) + multi-tab editor (right) + run log (bottom).

  • Click any .qe file in the tree to open as a tab.
  • Shift+H / Shift+L cycle tabs; Cmd+W closes the active tab.
  • Cmd+S is the bus stop:
  • .qe backtest → forks qe_run, stdout/stderr into the log, results.json lands → F4 BCKT auto-refreshes.
  • .qe sweep → loads spec into F4 BCKT's sweep panel, runs it.
  • positions.json → re-mounts as live positions, F1 / F5 auto-refresh.
  • Vim mode (toggle Cmd+Shift+V): i a I A o O insert, h j k l w b e 0 ^ $ gg G motions with counts, x X dd yy p P u Ctrl-R edits, D C v V line/visual operations, :w :bd :q ex.

Minimal .qe example (in backtests/example_ma_spy.qe):

let fast = 10
let slow = 50

backtest(
  data     = yahoo("SPY", "1d", "2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),
  strategy = signal(
    entry  = cross_above(sma(close, fast), sma(close, slow)),
    exit   = cross_below(sma(close, fast), sma(close, slow)),
    symbol = "SPY",
    size   = 1.0,
  ),
  execution = execution(capital = 100_000, commission_bps = 1.0),
  output    = output(results = "out/ma_spy.json"),
)

Full grammar: docs/qe-language.md.

F4 BCKT — review results

Sweep matrix (top) + equity curve + KPIs + recent fills + monthly returns heatmap.

  • If F3 saved a single-config backtest: equity / KPIs / monthly matrix render off the produced results.json.
  • If F3 saved a sweep: sweep matrix on top (2D bucketed, ◆ on the best cell). Click any cell → re-runs that config with let-overrides, re-points results_json at the new file, rest of the screen swaps to that cell's results.
  • Monthly matrix uses a 3-tier diverging palette (red / neutral / green); NaN cells are dim gray.

F5 RISK — portfolio risk

Always-on meta strip — NAV / Gross / Leverage / Long-Short / day P&L / open P&L on the first line, then Σ Greeks (only when the book holds options) / VaR95 / ES99 / worst stress scenario on the second — over four sub-tabs:

There is deliberately no NET slot. The positions schema carries no cash leg, so a "net" figure would be NAV computed twice.

Tab What's live
Overview Concentration glance, grouped by GICS sector when the market-map universe covers the names or cfg.sectors is set, per-symbol otherwise. Says how each position was priced — live quote / venue mark / AT COST — and how old the venue's marks are.
Greeks Black-Scholes Δ/Γ/ν/Θ/ρ per leg + Σ; needs positions_json.options[]. Equity-only Δ$ if no options.
VaR & Stress VaR/ES via historical / parametric + 8 spot+vol scenarios
Factor PCA correlation matrix + portfolio exposures + per-PC stats + strategy IC

F5 reads the attached daemon's book in preference to positions_json. PositionsCache has three sources — none, a watched file, or the daemon's view of the broker — and each panel's badge names the one it used.

The empty state distinguishes two cases that look alike and are not. With nothing loaded it reads "no portfolio loaded — attach a daemon, or set positions_json in dashboard config (Settings (Cmd+,))"; with a daemon attached and a genuinely flat account it reads "the daemon reports a flat account — no positions to measure". Telling an operator who already has a daemon to go and set positions_json is advice for a problem they do not have, and it invites them to point the screen at a stale file.

Active tab is persisted across launches.

F6 TRADE — manage live orders + deploy daemons

F6 has two layouts depending on whether qe_daemon is attached:

No daemon attached (Deploy panel takes the top half):

DEPLOY  ·  start qe_daemon on a live(...) .qe (F3 → Cmd+S → switch here)
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
File:     ~/Documents/quant-strategy/deploy_it_long_only_1000_paper.qe
Broker:   ibkr-paper  [PAPER]
IBKR:     127.0.0.1:4002  client_id=1
Symbols:  30 (AAPL, ...)
Capital:  $1000

[Arm deploy]            (two-click guard; live brokers also gate
                         on typing the broker name into a confirm box)

ACCOUNT · USD                           ORDER LOG
... empty until a daemon attaches ...   ... empty ...

[Trip kill-switch]   [Reconnect broker]   [Re-reconcile now]
[Stop daemon]

With no daemon attached the SAFETY / EVAL strip is not drawn — there is nothing to report and a row of em-dashes is furniture.

Daemon attached (normal 4-panel layout, reading from the daemon's control socket):

⚠ market data is DELAYED (15 min) — rankings are computed on prices of that age
· venue marks refreshed 41s ago  ·  its clock read 16:42

SAFETY · kill: armed · reconcile: clean · session: PAPER ibkr-paper
       · daemon: attached · venue: connected
EVAL   · last 2026-06-04 20:00Z ok 3 orders  ·  2 alerts

WORKING ORDERS                          EXECUTIONS (last 50)
ID    SYM   SIDE QTY    PX     STATE    TIME      SYM  SIDE QTY  PX
o-17  AAPL  BUY  0/10   150.50 WORK     14:32:05  SPY  BUY  1    495.10
o-18  SPY   SELL 3/5    495.50 PART     14:31:48  AAPL SELL 5    149.80
[Cancel] disabled in daemon mode        …
STAGED ORDERS          (only for staged-entry strategies)
AAPL  BUY   1/2   5    PENDING  Tue 09:30:30

ACCOUNT · USD                           ORDER LOG
cash          100,000.00                14:30:01 submit_attempt  AAPL BUY 10 @ 150.50
buying power  400,000.00                14:30:02 submit_accepted AAPL
equity        100,231.12                14:31:48 fill            SPY 1 @ 495.10
day P&L       +231.12 (+0.40%)          14:32:05 fill            AAPL 5 @ 150.42
  account: DUQ526944                    … auto-stick to bottom

[Trip kill-switch]   [Reconnect broker]   [Re-reconcile now]
[Stop daemon]

The SAFETY / EVAL lines sit at the top, above the panels, not in the footer — they were hoisted out so the state an operator checks first is not the thing they have to scroll past four panels to find. Above them is the daemon warning banner: one coloured line per thing qe_daemon status is unhappy about — a tripped kill switch, a market-data tier the venue granted that the daemon did not ask for, which of the three owners paused it (watchdog, feed, or operator — they clear differently, and naming the wrong one sends you to type a command that does nothing), undecoded venue frames, and how old the venue's marks are. It is empty on a healthy daemon, deliberately: a banner that is always present is one nobody reads.

  • Deploy panel (EPIC-66) — visible only when no daemon is attached. Reads cfg.active_live_path (set by F3 Cmd+S on a live(...) file), previews the file, two-click guard for paper brokers + typed broker-name confirm for live. Spawns qe_daemon via double-fork + setsid so the daemon survives the dashboard exiting; redirects stdio to ~/Library/Application Support/qe_daemon/logs/<stem>-<pid>.log. Polls kill(pid, 0) each frame after spawn and tails the log's [error] lines if the daemon dies pre-attach so you see the failure inline instead of digging through logs.
  • WORKING ORDERS / EXECUTIONS / ACCOUNT / ORDER LOG (EPIC-67) — when the daemon is attached, all four read from DaemonOrderCache which polls the daemon's orders / positions / equity / log_tail control verbs every 3 s. Same OrderSnapshot shape as the local-broker path, so the render code is uniform.
  • Cancel button is disabled in daemon mode — the daemon doesn't yet expose a cancel_order control verb. The tooltip points at the broker's own UI (TWS / Client Portal), which is the only place a working order can be pulled. Trip kill-switch is not an alternative: no kill-switch in this codebase cancels a working order — each one only blocks new submissions — and the F6 button trips the dashboard's switch, not the daemon's. See Emergency stop.
  • STAGED ORDERS sub-panel (EPIC-74) — appears under WORKING ORDERS only when the deployed strategy uses staged_entry / staged_exit and at least one slice is pending or recently fired. One row per slice: symbol, side, n/N fired, qty, state (pending / fired / cancelled), next fire time. See Staged entry / exit.
  • EVAL line (EPIC-75) — one inline row in the SAFETY footer: EVAL · last <close> ok 3 orders · N alerts. Green ok / yellow empty / red error; the alerts chip turns red on any eval_missed / eval_replay_mismatch / eval_idempotency_violation. Hidden until the daemon has eval activity. See Eval self-healing — including same-evening recovery via qe_daemon backfill.
  • Resizable panels (EPIC-82) — the 2×2 grid has a draggable vertical splitter between the columns (shared across both rows) and a horizontal one between the rows. Positions persist in config.json (layout.trade.left_col_w / top_row_h). The SAFETY footer keeps a fixed height.

  • SAFETY footer badges:

    • kill: — KillSwitch state. armed (green) / TRIPPED (reason) (red).
    • reconcile: — reconcile-worker state if the dashboard owns the broker; — otherwise.
    • session: — dashboard's own broker session (legacy / pre-daemon mode).
    • daemon: — control-socket attach state. attached (green) means the socket is up and the dashboard can read state. Whether it can also send is a separate fact the daemon reports on status: on a read-only socket F6 draws a READ-ONLY notice above the action row and greys out Stop daemon and DAEMON KILL, while the chip stays green. The top bar shows RO, plus @host when the daemon is on another machine. See the runbook's "Pointing the dashboard at it".
    • venue: — daemon's view of its broker link (EPIC-70). connected (green) / PAUSED · watchdog · N missed poll(s) (amber — soft-pause, reversible on reconnect; N counts failed polls, not seconds) / TRIPPED (reason) (red, hard trip).

    The amber chip has a second arm no earlier revision of this page mentioned: PAUSED · operator means someone ran qe_daemon pause and the venue link may be perfectly healthy — clear it with qe_daemon resume, not by chasing a disconnect. When both hold it reads PAUSED · operator + watchdog, so an operator who fixes the link and sees the chip stay amber has not failed to fix anything; their own pause is still on (apps/dashboard/gui_screen_trade.cpp, inside draw_daemon_status_strip). - SAFETY footer buttons: Trip kill-switch · Reconnect broker · Re-reconcile now · Stop daemon (EPIC-66 — sends stop control verb for a graceful shutdown). - "Trip kill-switch" trips the dashboard's switch, in the dashboard's process. It does not reach an attached daemon, and it cancels nothing at the venue. - DAEMON KILL row (EPIC-88 T88.10, decision D2) — the control that reaches the daemon's switch, which is the one that governs the broker session. Two deliberate clicks inside a 5 s window; the arming dies if the state changes under it. Disabled — never hidden — in two cases: when the control socket is down, rather than firing into a dead fd and reporting success; and when the attachment is read-only, because the daemon would refuse the verb, so the refusal is shown before the arming rather than after a two-click sequence. The row states, permanently and not only after you press it, that a kill blocks new submissions and does not cancel working orders. - CANCEL ALL row (EPIC-88 T88.1) — pulls every working order at the venue via the daemon's cancel_all verb. Also two clicks. It runs off the UI thread, so a slow venue does not freeze the window. Three things it will not do: report a count it did not measure (a book the daemon could not read renders as UNKNOWN, never as "0 working orders"), fold per-order refusals into a total (each one is printed with its own reason), or let you believe the book will stay flat — if the kill switch is not tripped it says so, because the strategy will submit again on its next cycle. Kill first, then cancel.

By design F6 has no order ticket — new orders are submitted from F2 DEPTH so you're looking at the book while you size. F6 is for managing what's already live + lifecycle (deploy / stop).

F7 FCTR — read a factor-research report

Press F7 directly. It is on the Tab cycle like everything else, but it is the screen people forget exists, because it is the only one that renders a file rather than live state.

Point it at a factor_report.json written by qe_factor (Cmd+, → Research → "Factor report path"). Nothing here fetches: the screen is a reader, and it reloads when the file's mtime changes.

FACTORS                      <- cross-factor summary; every factor at once
  FACTOR  IC  IC-IR  t(NW)  SHRP/hp  RET  WINDOWS

<factor selector>            <- then one factor in detail
  IC BY HORIZON              <- one row per horizon
  LONG-SHORT (top vs bottom <quantile>, N-bar rebalance)
  WALK-FORWARD IC            <- rolling windows, if the config asked for them

Header line: schema version, the file's mtime and its age, and the date range the study covers. Read the age first. A report that says v5 · 2026-07-10 14:22 · 3 weeks ago is answering a question about a market that has moved.

Read t (NW), not t. The plain t-statistic treats an h-bar forward return sampled every bar as independent and overstates significance by roughly √h — measured at 2.4–4.5× for h=20 on this corpus. t (NW) is the Newey-West correction. Hover the cell for the Bartlett lag, the HAC standard error, and the more conservative non-overlapping cross-check; those four numbers exist so the correction is auditable rather than magic.

A report older than schema v5 has no NW column. The verdict then falls back to the uncorrected statistic and says so on screen with a star rather than quietly grading on the wrong number. Re-run qe_factor to get the honest one.

WINDOWS counts by sign. 12+ 3- / 40 means twelve windows significantly positive, three significantly negative, out of forty. A bare count of |t| > 2 answers "did this factor have an opinion", not "was it right" — and reading it as the latter is what put a factor described as "most stable across windows" into a research corpus when a third of its significant windows pointed the other way.

SHRP/hp is per holding period, and that basis changed between report schema v4 and v5: v1–v4 annualised every long-short by 252 regardless of rebalance cadence, inflating it by √rebalance. A v4 report is marked. F4 BCKT and F5 RISK have columns called SHARPE/yr, which are a different number on a different basis — see Column vocabulary.

If periods were skipped the panel says how many and what fraction of the sample actually ran. A study that completed sixty periods and skipped four hundred is not a study of the period you asked for.

F8 MAP — sector-grouped market mood

WINDOW [1D] [5D] [1M] [3M] [YTD]   REFRESH   LAST 14:31:48 · 491/503 OK
┌──────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬────────┐
│  Information Technology      │  Financials              │ Energy │
│  ┌─────┬─────┬───┬───┬───┐   │  ┌────┬───┬──┬──┬──┐    │  ┌──┐  │
│  │AAPL │MSFT │NVDA│GOO│META│  │  │JPM │BAC│..│..│..│    │  │XOM│  │
│  ├─────┼─────┼───┴───┴───┤   │  ├────┴───┴──┴──┴──┘    │  ├──┤  │
│  │AMZN │CRM  │ ... 50+   │   │  │  ... 70+ tiles ...   │  │CVX│  │
│  └─────┴─────┴───────────┘   │  └────────────────────────┘  └──┘  │
├──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┴────────┤
│  ... 8 more sectors ...                                          │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  • One tile per S&P 500 constituent. Area is market cap where the universe file has one, and equal-weight for any constituent it does not — so a treemap can be a mix of the two. The controls row states which rule produced the picture you are looking at (SIZE MKT CAP, SIZE EQUAL, or SIZE MKT CAP · N of M have none), because a $3 T tile sitting next to a fallback tile is otherwise a picture of nothing. Color is the % change over the selected window, clamped at ±3 %, finviz-style red ↔ grey ↔ green.
  • Hover a tile for ticker / name / sector / industry / window % / last + prev close.
  • Right-click copies the ticker to the clipboard — paste straight into F1 watchlist or an F3 WKSP .qe config.
  • REFRESH forces an immediate sweep; the cache otherwise refreshes every 30 s.
  • Universe lives at data/universe/sp500_gics.csv (regenerated by tools/gen_sp500_universe.py from Wikipedia). If the file is missing, the panel renders an empty-state hint and the rest of the dashboard is unaffected.

3. End-to-end paper-trade flow

0. Gateway / Alpaca creds OK     · top-bar badge shows PAPER
1. F1 MAIN  : add symbol         · ↑/↓ to focus the one you want
2. F2 DEPTH : eyeball the book   · pick a limit price
3. F2 ticket: Submit             · WORKING ORDERS row appears
4. F6 TRADE : watch the fill     · ORDER LOG / EXECUTIONS update
5. (repeat 2–4 as needed)
6. Cmd+Shift+X if anything looks wrong  → KILL ·  no new orders
7. Cmd+Q

Research-only session (no live broker):

1. F3 WKSP : edit a .qe          · vim or plain text
2. Cmd+S   : qe_run forks        · log streams into F3
3. F4 BCKT : equity / KPIs       · auto-refreshes on save
4. (iterate)
5. Cmd+Q

4. Safety net — what each guard does

Trigger Effect
Cmd+Shift+X Trips the dashboard's own kill-switch (not the daemon's — they are separate objects in separate processes). To reach an attached daemon's switch use the F6 DAEMON KILL row (EPIC-88 T88.10); this chord deliberately has no daemon equivalent, because a one-way remote kill should not be a keystroke. New submit_order is rejected. Orders already working at the venue are untouched — nothing here cancels them; cancel + read-only calls stay open precisely so you can go drain them yourself. First-trip-wins: only the first chord captures a reason; later presses are no-ops. Persists until restart. See Emergency stop.
Actual positions ≠ broker positions Reconcile worker pops a read-only drift modal. No auto-fix. You decide whether to adjust manually in the broker UI. See live-trading-safety.md.
Broker socket drops Top-bar badge → BROKER OFFLINE. Reconnect via Broker menu or F6 SAFETY [Reconnect broker].
Day-loss limit exceeded In the daemon (EPIC-88 T88.4): evaluated continuously, on every mark update, against the strategy's marked-to-market P&L anchored on execution(capital = ...). Two consecutive breaching marks trip the kill-switch — so a position can no longer bleed through the limit all session just because nothing was being submitted. New submissions then stop; working orders are not cancelled. In the standalone dashboard, SafeBroker's per-submit check is still the only gate: it rejects that one order and trips nothing. IBKR day_pl arrives via the account stream.
ibkr-live selection Requires IBKR_LIVE_TRADING=I_KNOW_WHAT_I_AM_DOING env var and typing the broker name into the confirmation modal. Triple gate; deliberately annoying.

5. Persistence — what survives a restart

State Persisted? Where
Watchlist / focused symbol ✓ config.json (auto-save on exit)
Broker selection + IBKR knobs ✓ config.json
Workspace path + active backtest/sweep file ✓ config.json
Active F5 RISK tab ✓ config.json
Layout splitter positions ✓ config.json (per-screen)
F3 editor open tabs ✗ Re-open from the tree next session
Working orders at the broker ✓ (broker side) TWS / Gateway / Alpaca keeps them; dashboard re-syncs on reconnect
Kill-switch state ✗ Always armed on launch — by design

6. Common surprises

  • F6 ACCOUNT shows zeros under IBKR. Older builds returned an empty AccountInfo stub. Update to a recent build with the account-stream wiring; cash / buying_power / equity / day_pl populate from REQ_ACCOUNT_DATA.
  • Dashboard launches with BROKER OFFLINE even though Gateway is up. Expected for a second or two: the IBKR broker now constructs on a background thread (EPIC-81) so the window appears immediately instead of blocking on ::connect() — which used to look like a ~75 s freeze when the Gateway was down. The badge flips to PAPER or LIVE when the connect resolves — those and OFFLINE are the only three values it takes. If it stays OFFLINE, check the Gateway and the log.
  • Historical Data Farm is Inactive: ushmds in Gateway. Informational, not an error. Means "no one's requesting historical bars; the connection is dormant". The dashboard itself doesn't use IBKR historical data (Yahoo handles its charts); qe_daemon only requests it once per deploy for warmup. Ignore.
  • F4 BCKT empty after Cmd+S. The .qe's output(results = …) path is relative to the workspace root; check the path printed in F3's log pane resolves to a writable directory.
  • Vim cursor not highlighted on F3 tree. Already fixed in a recent build; if you see this, rebuild.
  • F6 TRADE blotter row says WORK but never moves. Check the order is within trading hours for the symbol's exchange. Outside hours, IBKR holds the order; Alpaca paper accepts but won't simulate fills.

6a. The command line

/ or Cmd+K focuses it. Esc clears the line and gives the keyboard back.

[SECURITY] [CODE [SUB] [ARG]]
  • AAPL — focus that symbol, stay where you are
  • AAPL DEPTH — focus it and jump to F2
  • RISK GRK — F5 RISK, Greeks tab
  • BCKT out/run.json — F4 BCKT re-pointed at a results file
  • FCTR report.json — F7 FCTR re-pointed at a factor report
  • =MAP — the ticker MAP, not the screen. = escapes a collision
  • KILL — trips this process's kill switch (same as Cmd+Shift+X)

Tab opens the completion list, ↑ / ↓ step it (or step history when no list is showing), Enter applies the selection or runs the line.

The authoritative list of codes is HELP, typed into the bar itself. It is generated from the same mnemonic table the parser reads (kDefaultMnemonics), so it cannot disagree with what the app accepts.

That is why there is no table of codes in this document. T87.16 removed a hand-typed copy of the F5 tab list from the mnemonic descriptions for exactly this reason — it printed the tabs twice, once generated and once by hand, and the hand-typed one was already drifting. A second copy here, updated by whoever remembers, would be the same mistake at a larger distance from the code.

6b. Column vocabulary — one name per field

Every screen is a grid of tables, and until EPIC-87 T87.31 the same field wore a different name on each one. Executions were the clearest case: F1 TAPE, F4 EXECUTION and F6 EXECUTIONS render the same shape of row — a fill — and shared not one column name between them.

This is the canonical list. A new column takes a name from this table or adds a row to it. Two names for one field is a bug in a terminal: it is the mechanism by which an operator reads a number as the wrong quantity.

Field Canonical Format Align Where the unit lives
Instrument SYM ticker, upper left —
Traded price of an event PX 2 dp right header currency
Last traded price LAST 2 dp right header currency
Valuation price MARK 2 dp right header currency
Your quantity QTY integer, or 2 dp if fractional right shares/contracts by context
Resting book depth SIZE integer right shares
Cash value of a fill NOTIONAL compact (1.2M) right account currency
Cash value of a position MKT VAL compact right account currency
Unrealised P&L OPEN P&L signed compact right account currency
Realised P&L REALIZED signed compact right account currency
Session P&L DAY P&L signed compact right account currency
Return, fractional RET% signed, 2 dp, % right in the label
Wall-clock instant TIME hh:mm:ss local left date via separator row
Elapsed duration AGE 4m, 2h right in the value
Weight of a leg WGT% signed, 2 dp, % right in the label

Names that look like duplicates and are not

  • LAST / MARK / PX — a trade print, a valuation, and the price of one specific event. Collapsing them would make "the price" mean three things.
  • QTY / SIZE — yours versus the book's. A ladder's SIZE is resting liquidity you do not own.
  • NOTIONAL / MKT VAL — what a fill cost versus what a holding is worth now.
  • TIME / AGE — an instant versus a duration. A column that sometimes shows one and sometimes the other is the reason this distinction is written down.
  • SHARPE/yr / SHRP/hp — F4 BCKT and F5 RISK annualise per year; F7 FCTR's long-short is per holding period, and that basis changed between report schema v4 and v5. The basis belongs in the label, not in a doc the reader does not have open. Any future Sharpe column carries its basis the same way.

Renamed by T87.31

SYMBOL→SYM, PRICE→PX, WHEN→TIME, VALUE→NOTIONAL, uP&L→OPEN P&L, RETURN→RET%, SHARPE→SHARPE/yr.

7. Where to look next